Meta Introduces Teen Safety Features for Instagram, Quest

Meta introduced a new Family Center for Instagram Wednesday, as well as parental supervision tools that will be available for Instagram Thursday and for Quest in May. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri explained in a blog post, “This is the first step in a longer-term journey to develop intuitive supervision tools, informed by experts, teens and parents. Our vision for Family Center is to eventually allow parents and guardians to help their teens manage experiences across Meta technologies, all from one central place.” Family Center is where parents can access supervision tools and tap into an education hub with articles, tips from experts and videos about how to discuss social media with their teen. Meta worked with groups including Connect Safely and Net Family News on those resources, and it said Family Center will continue to be updated with new information. Instagram’s new supervision tools will enable parents to see how much time their teen spends on the application and set time limits, as well as view accounts the teen follows and accounts that follow the teen and receive notifications if the teen reports another user. As the tools debut, teens will have to initiate their use via the mobile app, with the option for parents to initiate supervision on desktop or mobile coming in June. Teens must approve parental supervision if their parent or guardian requests it. On the virtual reality front, Meta wrote in a blog post, “We have a responsibility to help keep people safe on our platforms. From single-player games and apps to social experiences where behavioral norms are still being established, VR presents unique benefits, as well as unique challenges. VR is still a relatively new medium for many. And for parents, guardians and responsible adults with teens aged 13+ in their lives, it can be hard to know where to start. Providing age-appropriate and safe experiences for teens while also empowering them to explore in VR is a balancing act. We want to help parents, guardians and teens better navigate VR by providing support and education on the tools that are available today, as well as those coming in the future. In April, the unlock feature on Quest headsets will be expanded so that parents and guardians can prevent access to non-age-appropriate experiences for teens. Starting in May, teens will automatically be blocked downloading designated age-inappropriate apps. Those two steps will be followed by the rollout of a Parent Dashboard with a suite of supervision tools. Teens 13 and older will submit an “Ask to Buy” request when seeking to download or purchase an app that is blocked by default based on its International Age Rating Coalition rating, triggering a notification to the parent, who can then approve or deny the request from the Oculus mobile app. The parent will be able to view all apps owned by their teen and block specific apps that they deem inappropriate, which prevents the teen from launching those apps. Other information that can be viewed by the parent via the Oculus mobile app includes headset screen time and friends lists. Link and Air Link can be blocked, preventing the teen from accessing content from their PC on their Quest headset. Teens with linked accounts will be able to see a read-only view of the Parent Dashboard from the Oculus mobile app. Meta said it used insights from its Trust, Transparency and Control Labs and its global co-design program to incorporate feedback from experts, guardians, parents and young people into the development of its supervision tools. The company concluded, “Over the next months, we will add additional features to these tools and expand them to include other Meta technologies.”

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Meta Introduces Teen Safety Features for Instagram, Quest

A new Family Center includes access to parental supervision tools, education hub

David Cohen

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